Jurgen Klopp believes Liverpool’s fringe players have put themselves in contention for a starting role against Chelsea this weekend after they secured FA Cup progress.
Harvey Elliott’s 13th-minute wonder strike was enough to earn the Reds a hard-earned 1-0 win at Wolverhampton Wanderers in their third round replay on Tuesday night.
Elliott was one of eight changes made to the side that suffered a 3-0 Premier League loss at Brighton and Hove Albion last Saturday, a performance Klopp regards as the worst of his seven-year tenure.
AS IT HAPPENED: Wolves vs Liverpool LIVE
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The Reds will aim to start gaining ground on the top four when they entertain Chelsea in a crucial Anfield match on Saturday. And asked if those who featured at Wolves had played their way into his thinking, Klopp said: “Yeah, yeah. We have a couple of days training.
“I don’t think it would be right after one game to say that’s the team for the next eight weeks or whatever. Let’s have a look. I hope that Darwin (Nunez) is coming back and training tomorrow or Thursday. He might then be in contention.
“Kostas (Tsimikas) got a knock in the back, so let’s see how they recover. We have now this game and four days to train (for the Chelsea game) and after that five or six days of training until the next game. It’s always like this, it’s always about who shows up in training.
“The door is open for everybody. We have to fight and whoever is ready to fight has a good chance to play.”
Klopp had promised before the game his players would “fight” after a series of poor performances left them still seeking their first win of 2023.
And he added: “Everybody who was with us got that reaction. It was a reaction we needed to show. We were compact, we were together, we had really good challenges.
“When we got the ball we played really good football in moments. We scored an exceptional goal and Harvey saw something not a lot of people saw, if I had been a goalkeeper I wouldn’t have expected a shot in that moment. It was a top goal.
“The game was much better and completely different to the last one and I’m really happy with that, all the individual performances were good. We really were together wherever we were.
“We won the ball higher up the pitch and won it in the midfield zone. It was good. I said to the boys after the game, that’s how it feels when you play well and win. We can’t remember it really any more when that was the case. Tonight it was the case and that’s why we are quite happy.”
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